‎Man climbs 50-metre mast in Abuja to protest bad governance

He included what he called schizophrenic governance, souring foreign-exchange, high commodity prices… and other grievances as reasons for his protest

Godwin Tsa, Abuja

A 26 year-old undergraduate, Nura Iliyasu, has mounted a 50-metre mast overlooking the Presidential Villa, Asokoro, Abuja, on a seven-day hunger protesting what he considers the bad leadership of the Buhari administration.

While calling on ‎opposition political parties to unite and produce a formidable candidate that would take over the leadership of the country, Iliyasu said his one-man protest was against the wrong direction of the country, pervasive hunger and starvation, poverty, youth redundancy and hopelessness.

He included what he called schizophrenic governance, souring foreign-exchange, high commodity prices, dysfunctional refineries and textile industries, elites medical tourism abroad, continued kidnappings, and other grievances as reasons for his protest.

In his protest flyers titled ‘Another season of dashed hope’, the student of the National Open University chronicled the alleged deficiencies of the Buhari administration to include a “battered and mutilated economy, spearheaded by devalued Nigerian currency comparative to the United States dollar and other foreign currencies; affront, total and disobedience to the rule of law with impunity, thereby rubbishing judicial independence, checks and balances as enshrined in Nigeria’s Constitution; uneven and selective war against corruption as amplified by the political stigmatisation and prosecution of political opposition under the aegis‎ of anti-corruption.”

According to him, “life today in Nigeria is evidently not dissimilar to the Hobbesian State of nature in which ‘life is too nasty, brutish and short.'”

‎He stated that “hyperinflation is “strangulating our people, starvation is prematurely snuffing life out of our people; deprivation and hopelessness is stagnating our youth progress from achieving the perennial slogan of ‘leaders of tomorrow.’

“Political hypocrisy and presence of selfish greed and [un]patriotism fuelled by insatiable and bottomless stomach, had combined to cause perpetual indirection and leadership bewilderment.”